


and they lived happily ever after until the end of their days

by procellous



Category: Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Gen, Lesbian Yara Greyjoy, POV Outsider, with mentions of Yara/OFC
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-13
Updated: 2019-09-13
Packaged: 2020-10-17 19:58:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20626703
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/procellous/pseuds/procellous
Summary: Yara Greyjoy does not usually tell her son bedtime stories, but she might make an exception for this one.





	and they lived happily ever after until the end of their days

**Author's Note:**

> This does feature a child OC, who is tiny and I love him. Please don't run away screaming. 
> 
> (A surprising number of my fics for this week feature child OCs, and no two the same. If that is just too much, tune in again on day 5.)

“Will you tell me a story?”

Yara stared at her son. “A story?”

He nodded quickly. “Mother and Grandmother always tell me stories before I go to sleep. I want to hear one of yours! I bet you’ve got the bestest stories _ever_. Please?” 

Yara considered this. There were benefits to being occasionally indulgent with her son, and it might just get him to settle down long enough to go the fuck to sleep and give her some peace and quiet for a few hours. Besides, she couldn’t imagine Balon telling any of them bedtime stories; if nothing else, it would make her a better mother than Balon had been a father, and that was always worth it. 

“If I tell you a story,” she said, fixing her son with a sharp look, “will you shut up and go to sleep afterwards?”

He nodded, squirming happily under the covers and clutching his stuffed seal. 

“Yeah? You promise, squidling? No fidgeting, no wiggling, none of that.” She grabbed his ankle under the covers so that he couldn’t move his feet. “You’re going to lie there quietly and go to sleep as soon as I’m done.”

“I promise!” he chirped, giving her a toothy smile that she didn’t trust even half so far as she could throw him. “Please? And a _true_ story, one with monsters and princesses and everything.”

“Demanding little shit,” she muttered, fondly. “Alright, but just one, and no interruptions.”

Monsters and princesses and everything…

“So. When I was young—”

“That’s not how stories start.”

“I thought you weren’t going to interrupt me?” She raised an eyebrow at him. 

“But you were doing it wrong! You _have_ to start a story with _Once upon a time_, everyone knows that. Otherwise it’s not a story, it’s just you telling me about something that happened. And all of Grandmother’s stories start _Once upon a time_,” he said, with the air of someone who had found an unbeatable argument. 

“Well, if Grandmother does it,” she grumbled without heat. She’d be more annoyed at her mother, but it was hard to be annoyed when Alannys was the only person who could consistently get the boy to listen. “Once upon a time, when I was young, my father decided that he’d rather be a king than a lord, and he rebelled against King Robert, and lost. Close your mouth, you said no interruptions. To keep my father from rebelling again, King Robert sent my younger brother Theon to Winterfell, to be a hostage in Ned Stark’s keeping. 

“So Theon grew up in Winterfell, far from the sea, and he made friends with his captor’s son, Robb. When Ned Stark was murdered, Theon even went to war with Robb, but he never forgot that he was Ironborn. He tricked Robb into letting him go to Pyke to ask for our father’s aid against the Lannisters, but when he got here, he took a ship and sailed North with us to raid his captor’s lands. He used what he had learned from them to take their castle with only twenty men.” And then he regretted it for the rest of his life, so he probably wouldn’t want her praising it—but if he wanted her to stop, he could damn well crawl out of the ocean and stop her himself. “But he was betrayed. His men were slaughtered and he was taken prisoner.”

She swallowed, trying not to remember her baby brother’s screams and sobs in the dark; trying not to remember the cage and the dogs and the thing that was not a human, not anymore. She prayed regularly that her son would never, ever know what exactly Theon had endured, that he would never know what it took to break a Greyjoy. 

“He was tortured for years by a monster in the shape of a man, until he couldn’t remember his own name.”

Her son’s face was pale, his eyes wide. “This story has a _happy_ ending, right?” he asked. His voice shook. 

“Yes,” she assured him. “Yes, it does. Because he wasn’t alone in there—the monster had forced Robb’s sister Sansa to marry him, and she remembered Theon from when he had been her brother’s friend. She reminded Theon of who he was, and they escaped together. They leapt from the castle walls, hand in hand, and for cold days and long nights they ran through the frozen land with the monster’s dogs chasing them. Theon sent her north, to find her brother, while he came west to the Iron Islands, to help me win my crown. And Sansa and her brother raised a huge army and took back their castle and she slew the monster.”

He let out a heavy breath, clearly relieved. 

“She rules the North, you know, and when we declared our independence from the Southern Kingdoms she sent us aid in his memory.”

“Were they married?”

Yara blinked in surprise. “No.”

“Oh. That would have been the best ending, I think, if they got married. He could help her rule the North like Mother helps you rule. And then she’d have a good husband who wasn’t a monster and they could be happy like you and Mother are. Though I guess they’d have to be in love for that. Were they?”

“I…” she hesitated. “I know that he loved her, but I don’t know if she was in love with him.”

“I think that she must have loved him. Heroes always love the princesses they rescue. It’s in all the stories.” He tugged the covers up to his chin. “Hey, if they had gotten married, would he have been a queen like Mother?”

“No, Sansa’s not their king, she’s a ruling queen. He would have been a prince, I suppose. I don’t really know, the North does strange things sometimes.” The Iron Islands were much more simple: they were ruled by a king, and her wife was the queen, and that was the way of it. Everyone had been eager to accept that; it was the familiar pattern. Yara wasn’t a woman, she was a king, and kings had wives and sons. The biology was just details, easily swept aside like the tide washing away footsteps on the beach. “Enough questions for now, squidling. Time for you to be asleep.”

“G’night, Mother,” he said.

“Good night, Theon,” she said, and brushed a kiss against her son’s forehead as she pinched out the candle.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, baby Theon has two moms. My city now.
> 
> Yara's wife conceived via a surrogate, and when asked about her son's paternity, Yara raises an eyebrow and says that he's the King's son, _obviously,_ and nobody dares to argue with her. 
> 
> Also, Yara and Sansa are close allies and nobody can take that from me. It starts out with them sharing grief over Theon and dead brothers and becomes deep respect for each other. They're not really _friends,_ but they do understand each other. It's solidarity.
> 
> Oh, and there is absolutely confusion in the legends about whether it was Jon or Robb that helped Sansa retake Winterfell, and probably at least one tradition that says it was Rickon, but Sansa's always the one who kills the monster.


End file.
